A Cautionary Note or Two, Amid the Pleasures and Pains of
Participation in Performance-making as Research

Keynote Address presented by Professor Susan Melrose at the
Participation, Research and Learning in the Performing
Arts Symposium
6 May 2011, Centre for Creative Collaboration, London.
Organised by the Royal Holloway University of London, The
Higher Education Academy
and PALATINE Dance, Drama and Music.

1. Expertise – so to speak

… an intuitive grasp of a situation and a
non-analytic and non-deliberative sense of the appropriate
response… (Lazarus E., 2000) (my emphases)

I propose to start with the observation that however readily we
might use the word ‘expertise’ in everyday contexts,
‘we’ have not yet really grasped what
‘expertise’ means, at least in research terms, nor
how it might (or might not) be acquired in the creative and
performing arts. Who do I include in my use of the pronoun
‘we’ and on what bases? Plainly I am referring to
academic colleagues in Performance Studies, but I am prepared,
foolishly perhaps, to include writing by professional
Philosophers: the latter have demonstrated a surprising level of
difficulty with the question of practice itself, let alone
expert or professional practices, for as long as there have been
philosophers. What follows are a few simple questions which mark
out the sort of territory we enter when the notion of expertise
is entertained in the registers of writing and other practices
specific to the research degrees and set-ups in HE in this
country: the first seems simple enough: what do we understand
expertise in the creative and performing arts to mean, not least
when we are widely required to write in academic registers?

2. Who can get expertise, how, and how do we know that he or she
has got it, when our research concern is an expert
performance-making that tends not only to involve collaboration,
but to involve differences in experience and research interest
in those participating? Can the participative researcher
‘get expertise’ through her or his participation in
a professional project?

3. How can we recognise expertise and (how) can it be verified,
if researchers are conventionally required to substantiate their
findings?

4. Where do we keep it?

5. What does expertise in performance-making cost and
what is it worth (along the lines of Bourdieu’s
notion of “symbolic capital”)?

6. How long does expertise in the creative and performing arts
last, and does it need progressively to be renewed? Is there
in-service training for expert-practitioners in the performing
arts, and might an expert practitioner study for – for
example - a professional doctorate in acting or in dance? If so,
where, and if not, why not?

7. what is the “knowledge status” of expertise, as
distinct from, for example, the knowledge status of
critical-theoretical writing in the doctoral context? Why is it
that some of us seem to know expertise in practice
when we see it, while remaining incapable of capturing
it discursively?

8. What is the epistemic status – that is, the
“knowledge-status” – of expert
creative-decision-making processes in performance production in
the context of and the set-ups particular to advanced research,
and to what extent might we be confident in declaring that in
terms of knowledge-status, expert creative decision-making
processes in performance production, as research, can be judged
to be ‘equivalent to’ those research practices and
processes that we might expect to find in a doctoral degree in
philosophy? A subsidiary question: how is it that the expert
practices of practitioners whose names tend to figure in
Performance Studies discourses - Robert Wilson, Ariane
Mnouchkine, Rosemary Butcher, Tim Etchells, Goat Island, and so
on – are widely approached as though their practices were
idiosyncratic rather than expert in terms of the disciplinary
mastery of making processes on which their work actually
depends?

9. Question nine concerns disciplinary specificity as such, and
asks whether we might not need to make the specificity of
disciplinary identity explicit, when it comes to expertise in
performance-making. My question is once again driven in part by
the politics of knowledge in the university and it responds in
part to the later 20thC aspiration to an interdisciplinarity
that could supposedly be taught in the university, as distinct
from a disciplinary mastery, a singular mode of invention, that
frequently could not.

2. Nominalisation and process words

Widespread, ontologising uses of the noun
“expertise” suggest that what we are interested in
when the matter of expert practices is raised, is a
highly-specific and recognisable “knowledge
category”, yet even practice-theoretical writers concede
that as knowledge-category expert practices are resistant to
verbal definition (Schatzki et al 2000). I have myself
consistently written about what I have called the
expert practitioner, over the past decade, but I would
concede that I have done so in the first instance for
knowledge-political reasons, that relate in part to the
widespread erasure of the term and of the notion of expertise
– let alone the professional - from mainstream Performance
Studies discourses. Symptomatic of that highly problematic
erasure has been the growing and apparently marketable focus in
the past decade or more, on something called “the
body” and “embodiment”, both generalising and
anonymising nouns whose uses fail to take into account the
differences between – for example – my body and that
of the highly trained and expert bodywork of a named performer.
The dancer Wendy Huston’s bodywork, or that of Darcey
Bussell, in other words, is expert, professionally trained,
highly disciplined, but also singular, and as my invoking their
names suggests, signature-bearing.

It is plain to me that some of the ‘knowledge
complexities’ specific to that expertise in the
“knowledge–centred practices” (Knorr Cetina
2000) that expert performance-making entails, have not been
adequately taken onboard in writing within the disciplines
involved, in part because of the knowledge-problematic they
bring with them. As I have already indicated, expertise can be
recognised in its practices, and attributed on that basis to its
practitioners, without those who recognise it being able to
articulate discursively, in detail, what constitutes it. Is it,
on this basis, un-speakable, or have we simply not yet
determined how to speak and write it?

One key aspect of expertise in performance-making
disciplines which seems to me to exemplify the difficulties and
point to some of the reasons for caution when we engage in
talking about this field of research is what I call
discipline-specific expert-intuitive process. I have
identified expert-intuitive processes as constitutive to expert
performance-making, yet those expert-intuitive processes are
rarely individually-owned, in collaborative practice. Nor are
they performed in isolation, in the making, because the outcome
of expert-intuitive processing, in the making, is systematically
subjected to, and modulated by, the logics of expert
performance-production - on which basis, if we are still
concerned with the knowledge-status of expert making process in
research terms, we might well have to acknowledge that in
the making, constitutive expert-intuitive processes are
non-identical with themselves. Similarly, these vital
expert-intuitive processes, constitutive to performance-making,
have their own time/s, on which basis they can be identified as
equally unavailable as such to the times and places of
spectating: spectators tend only to see the results of
expert-intuitive processes, often qualitatively-transformed,
through collaboration and the application of the production
processes equally constitutive to the discipline. Such
constitutive processes specific to expert making need, therefore
to be studied in their own time, and not at all in the
times and spaces of the performance event. Even from the
perspectives of an expert spectating, these
constitutive making processes can only be speculated about, can
only be inferred from the quite specific perspective of their
(modulated) outcome. Students of expert spectating, nonetheless,
are widely encouraged to guess at those unavailable causes, on
the basis of their engagement with results.

3. Feeling, looking-like and the “knowledge object”

What does expertise in the making feel like, and what
does it look like? Where is it held, and who can hold
it? These further questions are less naïve than they may at
first appear. Feeling-like and looking-like involve quite
different perceptual experiences, the one practitioner-centred,
the other not necessarily so; having expertise in the making can
apparently only be confirmed through its practices, yet I have
already argued that these tend to remain unavailable as such to
spectating. I propose to identify practices entailed in
‘feeling like’ and ‘looking like’, in
expert or professional set-ups, as “knowledge-centred,
epistemic practices”, along the lines set out by the
practice-theoretical writer, Karin Knorr Cetina in her
“Objectual Practice” (2000). “[M]any
occupations and organisations”, she argues, “have a
significant knowledge base” that its practitioners
practise, leading to the expectation that
“practitioners … have to keep learning” and
that “the specialists who develop the knowledge
base” need “to continually reinvent their own
practices of acquiring knowledge”.

Knorr Cetina is interested in research practices more generally,
and argues that in many instances research practices are likely
to be constructive and creative, rather than routine or
habitual, and as such they tend to exasperate many writing on
practice from the perspectives of social theory. These
constructive and creative practices are, in her terms, not only
complex and internally differentiated, but they are also - as
she puts it - affectively undergirded. (In terms of the research
meta-discourse, the metaphor she uses is both troubling and par
for the course, revealing as it does a ‘knowledge
difficulty’ on the part of the writer and, perhaps, her
field.) She is interested in and researches what she calls
“knowledge-centred and knowledge-based practices”,
which tend to involve “knowledge objects” and the
relationships that these entail. “Knowledge
objects”, she argues, are not necessarily objects in the
everyday sense of the term; one such “knowledge
object” worthy of practitioner-centred research might be
affect and its role in creative practice. Such knowledge
objects, she observes, are defined “by their lack of
completeness of being” – performance affect, after
all, is inseparable from the performance within which it finds
its place - and they are defined by their “non-identity
with themselves”. The constitutive
‘expert-intuitive’ processes I introduced above,
then, are “knowledge objects”; they are relational,
characterised by “their lack of completeness” and
“their non-identity with” themselves. As such, these
“knowledge objects”, constitutive to
practitioner-centred research, are both heretic and aporetic:
when they are viewed from a Performance Studies that is actually
a Spectator Studies in disguise, these objects trouble - and
might disrupt - the happy discourses of spectating, and they are
full of holes. They are equally affectively invested, as we can
see in a video clip that I have frequently played elsewhere but
propose to do so again here. I propose that we look at it here
as though our concern were not with personality and
idiosyncrasy, but rather with expertise in a collaborative and
participative framework – even if we might perhaps not
recommend these sorts of interactions to a work tribunal:

What we have seen here, if we can look beyond the apparent clash
of personalities, is a clash of knowledge-centred practices,
performed by expert practitioners caught up in the
affectively-invested making of new work; we can equally infer -
provided we ‘hold’ the expertise necessary to
discern it - the difference at work here between felt-experience
(in an actor) and how it looks, to a professional director and
expert audience; we can equally see that a
qualitatively-transformed expert practice will be relational: it
can only emerge in the dynamic interplay between inventive, but
in this case differently-experienced, singular performers, under
the directorial gaze. It absolutely cannot therefore be
formulated prior to its emergence. As such, then, the
actor’s own work is incomplete, as research object as well
as creative practice; and to the extent that it can neither be
extracted from that relational set, nor known in advance of it,
it is similarly non-identical with itself: the actor’s
invention is part only of what emerges, even though that part is
constitutive; and the experienced performer’s work,
similarly, will gain from its interplay with the other actor. It
is likely, if we think of affective investment, that the
experienced actor will be particularly attentive to the need to
allow her fellow actor to retrieve his situation, which means
that her own work, in this precise situation, will be in part
different from her other professional experiences. All present
are likely, given this highly complex scenario, to operate under
the heightened stresses that the video clip reveals, and to
recognise qualitative transformation of performance material
when it emerges. This complex scene, in other words, allows us
to perceive the “differentiation [between subject[ifying]
and object[ifying practices]” in the sphere of expertise,
but also “the possibility of a nexus between
differentiated entities which provides for …a form of
being-in-the-world...”. That is, a “form of
being-in-relation [that] also defines a form of …epistemic
practice” (181).

4. Disciplinary expertise as complex system and individual
elaboration

The actor’s apparent struggle seems, if one is aware of
acting as a complex system, to be a matter of the
knowledge-differences between practices emerging in isolation
from an already-thought-through knowledge and practices that are
as-yet-to-appear because they are relational and participative.
The actor, already expert, learns in the doing. His
mastery of expert practice will, in the terms brought to
practice theory by Charles Spinosa, be acquired through
relational practice. Its acquisition will be
elaborative, learned progressively in relational
practices, rather than through reflection. Elaborative
practices, according to Charles Spinosa’s reading of
Heidegger, are articulative, rather than deconstructive in terms
of the critical-theoretical tradition of the later decades of
the 20thC.

The distinction between the articulative and the deconstructive
in the development of expertise in the arts is an important one:
articulative practices elaborate expertise in creative contexts
and set-ups, and in some senses we might argue that elaborative
expert practices practise the performer, as much as
vice versa. They pre-exist every identifiable
instance/experience of performance-making, and thereby have
certain implications for new aesthetic choices: practitioners
seek qualitative transformation in order to own or inhabit these
acquired disciplinary schemata. But where do these
established practices that contribute to disciplinary expertise
pre-exist? Some might argue that they have been progressively
internalised, by expert practitioners, and passed on through
practice, but that metaphor seems to me to beg more questions
than it provides answers. In practice, they are
obtained through training, elaborated, subjected to individual
and relational judgement, and thereafter observable through the
models of intelligibility – or ways of understanding and
sense-making – that collocate with those elaborative
practices themselves; one such model of intelligibility –
and here is the rub - is often articulated, by performers at
least, as ‘it feels right’, suggesting that
expertise might be practised and felt, rather than known
discursively. To return to Knorr Cetina, her notion is that
practices that are creative and constructive are affectively
undergirded, hence not only felt but likely to be
strongly felt and contradictory. In terms of expert knowledge,
they are likely to be experienced to be incomplete in
themselves, never fully realisable, hence retained as a
possibility for making new work that feels right, as a tactic.
Thus, Spinosa argues, whereas expert “practices
…have a kind of telos”, yet “this telos is
only a tendency… that can be constrained by all sorts of
contingent circumstances” (209).

5. Epistemics and uncertain knowledge practices

In the uncertain light of these sorts of expert practices, that
include research practices, I need to make a distinction between
epistemics, concerned with knowledge-centred practices and
epistemology, which can be identified reductively as the science
of knowledge. When I use a term like the performance
disciplines, I am talking about certain clusters of
knowledge-centred practices that are organised such
that they embody not just widely recognised cultural schemata,
but the incompleteness, at any given moment, of the same. I am
attempting to reflect on what exactly I mean when I refer to a
notion like the ‘performance disciplines’, or
‘performance-making expertise’: I seem to be
concerned to identify certain ‘cultural schemata’,
which pre-exist and are virtual, and which seem to organise
certain sorts of clusters of practices; they ratify them, but
because these schemata are in fact both widely recognisable
and dynamic, they are equally ratified by their ongoing
enactment.

According to the sociologist Sewell, cultural schemata are
empowered and regenerated by the accumulation of resources
“that their enactment engenders” (Sewell, 1992, 13,
cited in Swidler, 2001). Enacting such cultural schemas
or sets of schemata, tends to generate arrays of resources that
accumulate around them, and revalidate them. One such
“array of resources”, if we are concerned with the
performance disciplines, are those brought into play in any
professional performance-making context – in the case of
the choreographer Kim Brandstrup, one such organised array of
resources is made available when the Royal Ballet commissions a
new piece of work from him, and makes available, amongst the
array of resources entailed, the complex knowledges held by a
number of professionally trained dancers, for a particular
period of time. Equally included amongst that array of
resources, however – and this might well be where some of
the “knowledge status” difficulties that I am
concerned with come into play – is the Royal
Ballet’s expectation, encoded in commissioning itself,
that Brandstrup has the capacity to engender performance
practices that are both expert in terms of disciplinary norms,
and ‘new’, ‘original’,
‘insightful’, and Brandstrup’s own expectation
that what he brings into being will be qualitative transformed,
in ways that are simultaneously beyond what he currently knows,
within his capacity to engender, and likely to surprise
him.

Given the knowledge basis that the Royal Ballet represents, and
despite some critical writers’ accusation that the Royal
Ballet is necessarily conservative, it remains the case that in
the terms I have set out, the Royal Ballet is a dynamic open
knowledge system, driven largely by the desire for qualitative
transformation. Any number of critical-theoretical histories of
the Royal Ballet, in other words, are inadequate to it.
Brandstrup’s work for it, like that of Wayne McGregor,
brings together the expert-intuitive, the elaborative, and the
logics of performance production, yet it systematically renders
these invisible, as far as audiences are concerned.

6. The momentary instantiation of expert-intuitive processes

I have identified expert-intuitive processes as constitutive of
expert making, but resistant to discursive accounting,
particularly from the perspectives of expert spectating. It is
important at this stage that we equally understand that they
present particular problems for the single researcher working
collaboratively: when it works, in the Mnouchkine
Tartuffe from whose rehearsals we saw the clip earlier,
that qualitatively transformed ‘work’ is the
property of neither one nor the other actor – it emerges
relationally - and it is no more the property of a single
actor-researcher within the group; nor is rehearsal work the
property of the director, since the times of the making are
non-identical with the time of the event. Any attempt to seem to
extract ‘my work’ from that relational set
necessarily transforms it; it emerges as partial, a momentary
instantiation of a research object, necessarily non-identical
with the performance ‘thing’ itself. While a
researcher-collaborator might seek to document the processes
involved, her or his perspective is partial, limited, at odds
with the processes of making that are specific to the discipline
and to the work of the practitioners involved.

7. Process, expertise, discipline-specific invention

I want to return briefly to the issue of expert-intuitive
processing as constitutive but highly problematic, in order to
insist here on the noun ‘processes’ and on the
hyphenated qualifiers ‘expert-intuitive’, in place
of the widely used and abused noun form ‘intuition’,
which has largely been erased from the dominant discourses of
Performance Studies. Some writing in Philosophy has indeed
concerned itself with ‘intuition’, whether in Kant,
or in Henri Bergson’s so-called intuitive method; but many
contemporary writers, even sympathetic to PaR, continue to
mis-take ‘intuition’ before proceeding to
fail to consider how expert-intuitive process engages with the
discipline-specific logics of production:

Some contributors to the debate on the specificity of
research in the arts entertain the belief that art comes
into being purely on the basis of intuition, on
irrational grounds and via non-cognitive routes, and
that this makes it inaccessible for investigation from
within.

This misconception arises when the non-conceptual content
of artistic facts becomes confused with their presumed
non-cognitive form, and when the non-discursive manner in
which that content is presented to us is presumed to betray
its irrationality. Yet the phenomena at work in the
artistic domain are decidedly cognitive and rational, even
if we cannot always directly access them via language and
concepts. Borgdorff, The Debate on Research in the
Arts, 2006 (my emphasis)

According to the American pragmatist, Rosenthal, writing in the
1980s, however, the intuitive is far from absent from the
groundings or procedures of Philosophy, and the assumption that
it might be the “non-conceptual” opposite of the
rational is unhelpful: “any philosophic system emerges
from basic intuitions”, Rosenthal argues, “and can
be persuasive for another only in terms of intuitions that are
not justified by rigorous argument”. Intuition, she goes
on, using a number of rather unhelpful but typically
spatialising metaphors, “underlies, overflows, and is
incorporated within the perceptions of common sense”
(203). Let’s simply argue, here, that expert-intuitivity
“is incorporated within the perceptions of [the expert
performance-maker]” such that the two together inform
expertise and invention.

Nonetheless, terms like ‘expert’ and
‘expertise’, or indeed ‘professional’,
do not figure in Rosenthal’s writing, and may well not
figure or have figured widely in the writing of other
philosophers. Yet I am prepared to argue that in the case of all
such writers, my hyphenated “expert-intuitive”
processing plays a constitutive role in their own professional
practices, whether these are educative or concerned with writing
for publication. In the case of performance-making, constitutive
expert-intuitive processes occur within and are already
modulated, as they emerge, in terms of discipline-specific
parameters. They play between the orders of the perceptual real
and what might be called, metaphorically and tentatively, a
‘higher plane’ where expert knowledges are organised
and organise. A professional choreographer ‘stores’,
schematically, not simply the ‘tools of her trade’,
but equally the specifics of her own signature. Stored
schematically, they serve as a major compositional tool, linking
this higher plane to those of the making, in the sense that they
provide sets of parameters, multi-dimensional diagrammatic
models and schemata, and whatever it is that determines a sense
of measure and discernment in the individual practitioner; it is
in these terms that options within systems of possible actions
seem to ‘come to mind’, already realising a ghostly
interface zone between the material real, the perceptual
intuitive and the work that needs to be made and signed. They
have the potential at least to take their place. They can seem
to emerge like lightning, and – curiously enough - we
often seem to experience them as ‘coming from
nowhere’, yet they tend ‘to work’.

Such apparent ‘flashes’ of insight allow for a quite
particular sense of the possible, that differs across the
spectrum of practitioners involved in performance-making; they
allow for the apparently artful conjuring forth of sensible and
felt knowledges, and for the recuperation of these, in terms of
and within the logics of production that apply both to the
discipline or sub-discipline, and to the practitioner’s
signature; they allow the practitioner to anticipate what might
work, to calculate its possible application, and to test it out.
We need to suppose, on this basis, that they take up expert
experience and something that I want to call professional
sensibility; but rather than replicate the already-experienced,
they offer new insights in a field whose orientation is to the
not-yet made. These new insights include those derived from
hyperbolic intuition – the Aha! moment - which are often
recognised, as Ulmer has pointed out (1994), with a powerful
feeling of certainty, when something seems suddenly to work -
and, working, to look back at the practitioner.

8. Experience, experimentation and expertise

When they emerge, as a momentary instantiation of signature
practice, and in their capacity to bring into conjunction in a
single instant, professional insight, echoes of the past, memory
and possibilities for the future, we can begin to recognise the
pertinency of the morphological link between
“experience”, “experimentation” and
“expertise”:

These morphological links are significant. Certainly, expertise
seems to be elaborated, progressively, not simply through
experience and experimentation, but through experience and
experimentation that are ratified relationally, and informed
progressively by that feedback loop that develops when work is
made public. This brings me to the first of my final
observations today, which is that experience itself, however
difficult it might be to characterise it discursively, to
quantify or to qualify it, and however undertheorised it might
be, is a vital and constitutive component in expert creative
practice. I have no interest however in a general theory of
experience, characterised by ever-increasing dematerialization
from the “perceptual and intuitive” world (Innis, R.
1999), even if one might be developed, for the far from simple
reason that the expert practitioner’s experience is likely
to be singular as well as expert, within a regime that valorises
both singularity and the new. The singular experience of the
expert practitioner, focused on an invention to come, provides
one of the grounds out of which expert-intuitive processing
emerges and it is in terms of experience – and its complex
relationship to anticipation and implementation – that
intuitivity is coloured and modulated. In epistemic terms,
specific to knowledge and the ways we evaluate and validate it,
at least in art-making set-ups, it seems to me that I am likely
to attribute at the very least validity – dare I say,
‘truth’ – to the as-yet unseen work of a
number of expert practitioners, on the basis of my
already-established estimation of the singularity of those
practitioners’ experience, and of their ability to
articulate it in complex practice. To speak of
‘truth’ or integrity, in this sense, signals
recourse to models of intelligibility relating to and widely
used in terms of the evaluation of expert invention, and as such
these notions are far from old-fashioned or outdated, as some
critical-theoretical writers might once have claimed. In expert
performance-making ‘integrity’ is likely to be
understood technically – as something to be done –
rather than metaphysically, at least in the first instance

9. Perception and anteception

Rosenthal describes “experience” itself, in general,
as “wider than perception”, and, indeed, “as
the context within which perception emerges” (68);
experience is foundational to the emergence of a world of
percepts, but in order to avoid use of terms like
“feeling”, “sensation” or “primary
experience”, to characterise it – such terms fail to
allow us to distinguish between the everyday and the expert -
she suggests that we draw on the Peircian notion of anteception,
which is a level of experience that is constituted by the
“continuity, over time, of rudimentary experimental
activity that is constitutive of our interaction with our
environment” – not just our everyday environment,
but more importantly as far as this presentation is concerned,
our professional environment. Anteception, she adds, is an
indefinably rich matrix within which the processes of perceptual
awareness and cognition are rooted, and from which they emerge,
and its character thereby enters into their structure and
content, modulates and colours it. I want, on this basis, to
characterise expertise as belonging to the anteceptive field,
wherein it is grounded, but to account for it as elaborated in
practice and retained as a set of multi-dimensional schemata,
that are curious in that they bear the impress of a singular
perspective and a capacity both for ongoing invention and for
qualitative transformation.

The anteceptive field, as contrasted with everyday feeling or
sensation, signals a different epistemic level or order, upon
which practitioners interact, both intuitively and
systematically, with what is available to them in the array of
resources I mentioned earlier, and with invention in the present
and future in mind. I am indeed arguing that when an expert
practitioner has a feeling or sensation within the context of
the expert invention of – for example, dance - her
professional experience provides a different epistemic level
within which that feeling or sensation is recuperable as
material available to be utilised in the process of invention of
new work: it is this possibility of recuperation, which does not
overtake but might well sharpen the feeling or sensation, that
suggests to me that processing plays its role between orders of
experience. She experiences this in-between activity as
potentially operative, potentially articulative in the invention
at hand. Its interplay brings into productive interplay memories
of work already made, either singularly hers or those of other
practitioners - which also means that these are affectively
charged memories; a challenging technical engagement with the
present moment, and an anticipation of what might be made, in a
context where something must and will be made from the array of
available resources that I mentioned earlier.

As Rosenthal’s work allows me to suggest, when something
emerging expert-intuitively seems, then, to “feel
right”, what the practitioner is calling a feeling is
neither, in fact, a psychological nor a subjective experience,
even though it is experienced by a subject; instead what she
calls a feeling involves an experience, linked to a perception,
on a “knowledge level” – an epistemic level
– that is quite specific to a particular moment in
professional making processes. She lives the experience twice or
three times over, on a number of planes, rich in qualitative
diversity and directional activity, and to a number of quite
specifically different integrative ends. The qualitative
diversity and directional activity is so rich that no pattern or
order is possible without discrimination; and it is this
capacity for discrimination that some of us might want to call,
switching registers, professional judgement. Yet in my
experience, such integrative complexity tends to remain
invisible to many practitioners, at the very moment of their
immersion in it, whence the note of caution with which I began.

Works cited

Claxton G. “The Anatomy of Intuition”, in T.
Atkinson and G. Claxton (eds), The Intuitive Practitioner:
On the Value of not Always Knowing What One is Doing,
Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000.

Eraut M., “The Intuitive Practitioner: A Critical
Overview”, in Atkinson and Claxton, (eds), The
Intuitive Practitioner: On the Value of not Always Knowing What
One is Doing, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000.

Innis R., “Peirce and Polanyi: Perceptual Consciousness ad
the Structures of Meaning”, Proceedings of the
International Colloquium on Language and Peircian Sign
Theory, New York: Burghahn, 1999.